Jan Assmann concludes that there is a difference between collective and social memory, as memory has evolved from a biological framework to a cultural means. Collective memory and collective concept are repeated through societal practices and initiations that act as a way for generations to guarantee survival. Assmann goes on to differentiate between communicative memory, which comprises variations of collective memory that are founded on everyday infrastructures and has a “limited temporal horizon” of eighty-to-hundred years in the past, as well as cultural memory, which is “characterized by its distance to the everyday” and has a “fixed point in which its horizon doesn’t change with passing time.” [1]

Pierre Nora focused on memory’s permanent evolution, susceptible to remembering and forgetting, whereas history is an incomplete construction. Nora goes on to discuss how memory, while archival, grounds people to an “eternal present” and adapts to what flatters it. History, on the other hand, “calls for analysis and criticism” and is considered a portrayal of the past. [2]

Considering the case for Israeli history, there are two competing narratives, the Zionist account and the New Historian narrative.The Zionist narrative used non-scholarly accounts of the past that were translated into English from Hebrew by public officials with the intention of garnering sympathy for Zionism. Whereas the New Historians used recently released archival documents that revised the picture of the Arab-Israeli conflict to show Israel as a strong and deliberate force. [3]

For example, Zionist memory believed that Israel acted within a realistic paradigm during the 1956 War. The Zionist narrative depicts the 1956 War as a responsive war that was inevitable and started by the united Arab nations, which were increasingly attacking Israel’s borders. Israel is depicted as being victimized even though it attempted peace talks with the Arabs. However, New Historians, using more technical documents, not based on memory, portray the 1956 War as a war of choice on Israel’s part. The New Historians found that Israel had wanted and searched for a war, that Israel had other alternatives and that Israel had stronger battlefield forces than that of the Arab nations. Also, conveniently forgotten when discussing the 1956 War was the internal split within Israeli politics between Sharett and Ben-Gurion. Sharett preferred diplomacy and negotiations, whereas Ben-Gurion preferred a hard-line retaliatory approach. [4]

Ben-Gurion won out over Sharett by utilizing the Zionist memory of events and narrative playing up the victimization of Israel in the past at the hands of the Arab nations. However, the New Historians have been able to prove that Israel had deliberately provoked attacks along its borders by refusing to alleviate the Palestinian refugee problem; it encouraged Israeli settlements and escalated reprisal raids. The use of Ben-Gurion’s Zionist memory led to the institutionalization of the military, which led to Israel’s military character through value, formula and ideology, therefore legitimizing memory over history. [5]